A Study Of Tang Poetry Translation With Reiss’s Translation Criticism Theory

Katharina Reiss, a German prestigious translation theorist, put forward a set of translation criticism theory in her book named Translation Criticism-The Potentials and Limitations in 1970 s, which renders critics a referential way for the comprehensive and objective evaluation of different translations. On the basis of Bühler’s classification concerning language functions, Reiss classified the source text into four text types, namely the informative text, the expressive text, the operative text and the audio-medial text, and gave different translation strategies and criteria of evaluation for various texts.Chinese poems have achieved the peak in the Tang Dynasty. As gems of Chinese poems, Tang poetry reflects the political, economic, cultural life and all aspects in the Tang Dynasty, which is the treasure trove of Chinese traditional cultures, and beloved by readers both at home and abroad. With the development of times, more and more scholars voice growing concern over the translation of Tang poetry. So the renditions are also various. From the perspective of Reiss’ s text type theory, Tang poetry belongs to the expressive text. In accordance with Reiss’ s translation criticism theory, the translators should try their best to retain the features of linguistic form, and create equivalent aesthetic effects by adopting the same or the similar linguistic expressions.Jing Ye Si is a classical, lyric poem, whose language is implicit and refined, and has neat sentences and clear rhythm. So the poem is familiar to the public, and is passed on from generation to generation. The author of the thesis selects eight English versions of Jing Ye Si translated by eight different translators to make a comparative analysis whose theoretical framework is Reiss’ s translation criticism theory so as to expound how to make the evaluation of poetry translation comprehensively and objectively.The thesis comprises five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction, which introduces background, purpose, significance of the research briefly and the methodology adopted in the research. Chapter two is literature review. It analyzes the main features of Tang poetry, and reviews Tang poetry translation theories, and the present research situation of translation criticism both at home and abroad. Chapter three is the introduction of the theory, which has expounded Reiss’ s text type-oriented translation criticism theory and subjective limits of translation criticism. Chapter four is the main body of the thesis. The author employs Reiss’ s translation criticism theory to make a comparative study of eight renditions from multi-perspective, describing different renditions to reflect the regularity of features, and explores the reasons for these translation activities from the dimensions of culture, linguistics, space, fuzziness, and translator’s ideology, trying to explain translation phenomenon objectively. Chapter five is the conclusion. It concludes the whole contents of the thesis. Based on the comparative analysis and study, the research indicates that the poetry translation according to the expressive text which lays emphasis on the linguistic form can make the readers in English-speaking countries appreciate the original beauty of Tang poetry to a great extent. From another perspective, if evaluating poetry translation from the factors of text type, linguistics, extra-linguistics and function put forward by Reiss, it can make us give a full understanding of the renditions, and employ much fairer and more objective evaluation for those which seem to deviate from the original text.